Data input systems such as virtual predictive keyboards enable a user to more easily enter data to an electronic device such as a smart phone, wearable computer, desktop computer or others. One or more candidate words or other text items are computed by the predictive technology as being potential candidates the user might want to enter next. One or more of the candidates are offered to the user so that he or she is able to input one of the candidates by making a single user input such as a single key press so as to save having to individually type in characters of a word, or having to scroll through lists of emoji or other text items. However, if the user cannot find the text item he or she wants in the offered candidates the user must proceed with selecting individual characters or scrolling lists of emoji. As the user enters individual letters of a word or makes scrolling actions to select emoji, the predictive technology may recompute (also referred to as re-rank) candidate predictions in the light of the additional data from the user. The re-ranked candidate predictions are then offered to the user for data input. This process of re-ranking the candidate predictions often repeats several times in cases where the user cannot find the text item he or she wants in the offered candidates.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known data input systems.